Optimizing the website functionality and performance

Bondora News

Our website has had an unexpected and considerable increase in traffic and approved loans on the marketplace due to some successful campaigns.

This has caused the website to slow down on peak times and specifically causes performance issues when some parts that use more of the system capacity are used, like secondary market, account statement and some other functionality of the website.

Therefore we need to currently turn them temporarily on/off whilst improving system performance to ensure that core functionality is not affected. We aim to optimize all of these functionalities and return everything to a steady state by the end of the month.

Meanwhile we have moved some of the heavy capacity pages to different servers so they wouldn’t affect the rest of the site as much and unfortunately need to keep turning some features off every now and then if loads increase.

We are working towards sorting all the issues out as fast as possible.

Optimizing cancellations processes

The new process was introduced because customers want a quick response and they will otherwise cancel their loan application. This mainly affects prime customers who have many options available to them so longer waiting times affect mostly customers with best credit backgrounds.

It’s competitively required to get the offer to the market as soon as possible. At the same time we now need to optimize the flow so the applications would not later be cancelled in masses.

When applications are cancelled, the customer receives a new offer calculated based on updated data. If they accept it then they will get back to the market again.

Currently loans are cancelled if any bit of data changes. The current cancellation level is caused by a product rule which needs to be improved upon.

At the moment, each loan is cancelled in case any data changes (e.g. we calculate customer average income to be 7 euro less than customer stated). This is currently causing roughly 40% of applications going to a second cycle (20% get cancelled because of actual risk issues identified during post funding check and 40% get direct green lights) although from a risk perspective there is no actual change.

We are updating both the communications and flow so only risk changes are considered significant enough to force a cancellation and a new offer. We will also make the flow smoother for the customers who get the second offer.